Comment Re:Who asked this question? (Score 5, Insightful) 332
Hey, PerlJedi,
Just thought I'd throw out that I'm happy to see your interaction here. It's always bugged me how little the
Hey, PerlJedi,
Just thought I'd throw out that I'm happy to see your interaction here. It's always bugged me how little the
"Begun, the Drone Wars have."
I was actually looking a bit further into the future for holiday travel. It's $82 round trip to take a direct flight between Philadelphia and Boston.
I'm not arguing with you, but I'm really quite curious where you found $41 tickets (avg) on a flight. That seems insanely cheap, especially for holiday travel. And does that include the various taxes and fees?
The reason people don't travel by train in the USA is because a train trip cost more than DOUBLE the cost of a flight and it takes one day per flight hour to get to your destination (with multiple transfers).
The reason a train trip costs a lot and takes a long time (for most trips outside of the Northeast Corridor) is because we haven't invested in the railways to make it otherwise. I reluctantly agree that long-haul high-speed rail in the United States is probably a pipe dream and will probably never be a sufficiently cost-effective compared to the other options. But regional rail (like the Northeast Corridor) generally is useful and cost-effective (relatively speaking - all transportation infrastructure loses money; that's why the government does it and not the private sector). California is one of the few places where regional rail makes sense in my opinion - there's a lot of churn between the major cities.
(Side note: Please don't start your post in the subject line, it's very confusing to follow)
I was just recently looking into buying tickets from Philadelphia to MA for travel. Guess what? It's cheaper to fly. By a factor of 3.
Huh? Rarely is that the case. You might have hit a peak travel time or something. I pulled a date out of my butt and asked for Philly to Boston on December 1st, and Amtrak's prices were between $88 and $126 (Northeast Regional). There were also Acela Express fares that ranged as high as $245, but that's not apples to apples (Acela Express is all business class.)
Southwest Airlines prices, in the meantime, were $161 flat (Anytime fare).
Regardless, expensive isn't as much my consideration. The train (at least, the Northeast Corridor, along which I am very fortunate to live) is an order of magnitude less hassle than the airplane. And I can get up, walk around, and hang out in the cafe car. And no one yells at you for congregating outside the toilet. And the seats are actually reasonably sized. And along the NEC, the train will drop you off downtown, instead of some airport 10 miles out from the city where you then need to rent a car or take a bus.
Once you move beyond those boundaries, there's no coherency at all. For example, if you move the example destination from NASA Goddard to, say, Arundel Mills Mall in Hanover, MD, or possibly up to BWI Airport, the fun really begins.
Yes, you take the B30 bus from the Greenbelt Metro station to the terminal at BWI. That was tough!
(You could also take a bus to New Carrollton and ride up Amtrak or MARC to BWI.)
You can actually jump further into the future if you like.
No way, if I did that then I'd be skipping the Erika Eleniak and Pamela Anderson phase!
If I could shout into my watch: "KITT I NEED YOU BUDDY!" and have the Prius come racing to pick me up (bonus if it does a bootleg turn and pops the door open), I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Subscribers can see full comment history.
I'm already a red-shirt at NASA, sadly.
Nonsense. Thousands or tens of thousands could be spared secondary effects from the heat and blast wave. Just the simple act of not standing in front of a window can be the difference between a horrible death and surviving relatively unscathed. Surely you've seen this famous picture from Hiroshima: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_patient's_skin_is_burned_in_a_pattern_corresponding_to_the_dark_portions_of_a_kimono_-_NARA_-_519686.jpg
Yes, if you're sitting at or near the hypocenter, your opinion holds true.
Actually, I never change the clock on my motorcycle. I joke that only when the clock is right is it riding season.
When you go to a theme park, you can buy a "Fast Pass" which allows you to jump the queue.
FASTPASS is a Disney thing, and it's free. (Perhaps other theme parks have implemented something but DO charge, I don't go to them anymore.)
Check out the implementation; it's actually pretty fair.
That said, Disney *does* charge (out the wazzoo) for a VIP tour guide, who can skip lines, walk you through the park in inaccessible areas, and such. Generally, this is done for famous type people; more often than not, it's done for safety. Consider how unsafe (literally) it would be for, say, Justin Bieber to be walking through the park and standing in lines -- such a thing could literally cause a riot.
You're not that far off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_occupancy/toll_and_express_toll_lanes#Variable_tolls
Because people like me would start committing heinous crimes in hopes of being selected to go?
It's not like there's a shortage of people WILLING to go, even one way. Heck, even one way with a death certainty.
Computers will not be perfected until they can compute how much more than the estimate the job will cost.
